Thread by @Hardeep_Matharu

Wow. Government's race commission concludes that Britain is a "model to the world" on diversity and that there is no evidence of institutional racism in Britain today. Just wow. This is a significant attempt to roll back decades and decades of hard-won progress in this country 🔽

"Increasing 'diversity' does not, in itself, tackle racism when issue is a cultural, historic identity in which racism is embedded. To the contrary, it can be a smokescreen"

I wrote about difference between 'diversity' & institutional racism last week 🔽

bylinetimes.com/2021/03/25/div…

"What is concerning is not the issue of diversity per se but how it is increasingly being used to sidestep the systematic problems of race in Britain – which are being voiced more loudly and regularly than at any point in the past two decades"

"Well-meaning idealism of many young people who claim the country is still institutionally racist is not borne out... We found most of the disparities we examined, which some attribute to racial discrimination, often do not have their origins in racism"

theguardian.com/world/2021/mar…

Here is the full race commission report for anyone whp would like to read it 🔽

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

Tony Sewell in race commission report's foreword: "An unexplored approach to closing disparity gaps was to examine the extent individuals & their communities could help themselves through their own agency, rather than wait for invisible external forces to assemble to do the job"

Tony Sewell in race commission report's foreword: "We no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. The impediments & disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism"

Tony Sewell in race commission report's foreword: "Too often 'racism' is the catch-all explanation, and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined"

Tony Sewell in race commission report's foreword: "We have argued for the use of the term 'institutional racism' to be applied only when deep-seated racism can be proven on a systemic level & not be used as a general catch-all phrase for any microaggression, witting or unwitting"

The report states that "we do not believe that the UK is yet a post-racial society which has completed the long journey to equality of opportunity. And we know, too many of us from personal experience, that prejudice and discrimination can still cast a shadow over lives"